A decade ago Guy Maddin, the avant garde Canadian film maker with a fetish for recreating the look and style of silent cinema and the early talkies, made a film that a few people actually enjoyed and went to see, (The Saddest Music In The World.) Since then he has been warily seen as a talent meriting review, even though he is closer to video artist than mainstream movie maker. The Forbidden Room is like one of those things you might see projected onto the wall of the Tate Modern. Except this has stars, some exceptional visual effects, and you can't just wander into a darken gallery space, look at is quizzically for a minute or two and then wander off non nonplussed in search of something more worth looking at.

Maddin wants two hours of your time to show you what may be his magnum opus, a rambling phantasmagoria of stops and starts, bits and bobs. In a submarine carrying an unstable cargo of gelignite the already jittery crew suddenly discover a lumberjack aboard; next we see said lumberjack in the forest trying to gather together to rescue the beautiful Margot (Furey) from the wolfpack that has captured her; and on and on it goes; stories within stories, dreams within dreams flowing into each other and then doubling back to catch up with the vignettes later on. This is a film that comes close to the replicating the logic of a dream but only if this Finnegan is a film archivist whose subconscious is filled with title cards, back projection, black and white, and rocket ships held up by string.

It is a film like no other but let's try out some similes. It's like a Burroughs novels where he interweaves pastiches of a few different genre and twists them into something much more fevered. Or it's the experimental film maker’s equivalent of Tarantino's Grindhouse project, an obsessive technical recreation of cinema's former glories.

It is a hard, almost gruelling film to get through. It's like a two hour trailer. It's packed with humour, but humour that is as stylised and fiddly as the rest of the film so it rarely draws you in. It is though a kitchen sink effort: Maddin gives you the works. In among the back projection, scratchy film and title cards, he has a visual effect where faces and images dissolve and melt into something else that is beautiful, like a reflection in the surface of water that is lost in ripples and comes up as something else. The concentrated visual intensity of it (almost all of the film is shot in close up), the garish colour scheme, makes it actually quite painful to experience in the dark of the cinema. I found it precious, garish and twee, a hateful experience, yet as the lights came up there was a certain satisfaction at having made it through, that however unpleasant, it is at least something.